The Meat Mob Muscles In By: Merritt Clifton
From ANIMAL PEOPLE June 1997 editionwww.animalpeoplenews.orgReprinted by Permission - 24 April 2003

Eating Workers

North Carolina in particular is favored by both the hog and
poultry industries not only because of lax pollution regulations, but also
because of a "right-to-work" law that prohibits contracts which require
employees to pay union dues. As the heavily unionized red meat industry
contracts in the midwest through increasing centralization and mechanization,
the virtually non-unionized poultry industry and non-unionized segment of the
pork industry employ ever more people--who are collectively getting an ever
smaller share of the returns. Since 1963, the percentage of unionized meat
workers in the U.S. has dropped by half. Union wages in meatpacking averaged $19
an hour in 1980, but have dropped below $12--still close to double the average
wage throughout the industry.

Abuses are both rife and familiar.

Egg City, long one of the biggest poultry producers in
California, was unionized by the United Farm Workers in 1979 after a five-year
struggle led by the late Cesar Chavez, but a bankruptcy judge in 1986
invalidated the contract, enabling new management to impose an across-the-boards
30% wage cut. Chavez, a vegetarian, died while trying to revive the organizing
effort. The workers remained unrepresented when Egg City closed due to
obsolesence in October 1996.

In 1989 National Public Radio and the Washington Post reported
that Perdue workers in Lewiston, North Carolina, were routinely fired if they
reported injuries. Former labor organizer Henry Spira, now president of Animal
Rights International, amplified the charges in newspaper ads.

"Up to 30% of the workers in that factory are afflicted with
repetitive motion syndrome," the ads stated, "a potentially crippling disorder
of the hands or wrists caused by having to cut up to 75 chickens per minute. A
Perdue personnel memo stated that it was normal for about 60% of workers to go
to the (company) nurse for pain killers and to have their hands bandaged. Donna
Bazemore, a former employee, told National Public Radio that she'd seen women
urinating and vomiting on the work line because they were not allowed to leave
it to go to the bathroom. None of the Perdue factories is unionized. And in
1986, Frank Perdue told the president's commission on organized crime that he
sought help from organized crime figures to keep it that way."

Eight years later, the noise has subsided, but little seems to
have changed at the worker level. Indeed, the illness and injury rate for the
meat industry across the boards has risen to 36 lost-time cases per 100 workers
per year, as federal safety inspections have dropped 43% since 1994.

Preventing workers from using restrooms at will still seems to
be standard practice in poultry plants, as a local television program in May
1996 reportedly used a hidden camera to document yet another instance of it at
the Hudson Farms poultry processing plant in Noel, Missouri.